On October 26, by apparent coincidence, both Yahoo!News and Salon carried columns condemning the arrest and incarceration of Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala on October 3, at the first presidential debate for the two major party nominees. Here is the Yahoo!News commentary, which is by Tom Bissell. Here is the Salon commentary, by Greg Olear.
Art Goodtimes is running for re-election as a San Miguel County, Colorado, county commissioner. Every time he has been elected, he has been the Green Party nominee. The election is a partisan election, and the Democratic nominee this year is campaigning against Goodtimes by taking a more “green” stance on a mining issue than the incumbent Green Party nominee takes. See this story.
Lawrence O’Donnell has a weekly appearance on MSNBC, called “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.” He has been a writer for “The West Wing” TV show, an actor, and a political commentator. Here he publicizes the October 23 debate between four minor party presidential candidates; criticizes the major party candidates for failing to discuss indefinite detention and drug laws; illustrates that the minor party candidates did debate these issues; and finally, urges voters in non-swing states to consider voting for the minor party presidential candidate who best represents that voter’s views. But he suggests voting for one of the two major party candidates if the voters lives in a swing state. The segment is 8 minutes long.
Last year, Idaho passed its first procedure for voters to register into political parties. Twenty-nine other states, and the District of Columbia, also provide that voter registration forms ask the voter to choose a party affiliation (or independent status). The states then report the number of registered voters in each party, and the number of independent voters.
Idaho now has some registration data: Republican 196,271; Democratic 36,220; Libertarian 1,312; Constitution 548; independent 550,189. Idaho does not yet have any procedure to let voters register into unqualified parties. The 10th circuit, and the 2nd circuit, New Jersey state courts, and a U.S. District Court, have ruled that states must let voters register into unqualified parties that are active enough to place their nominees on the ballot. Because the Green Party and the Justice Party each qualified their presidential nominees for the Idaho ballot this year, they have a plausible claim that Idaho ought to let voters register into those two parties as well, even though they are not qualified parties.
On October 26, a U.S. District Court in Columbus, Ohio, ruled that Ohio cannot automatically disallow a provisional ballot just because it was cast in the wrong building. Both the U.S. District Court and the Sixth Circuit had already ruled in this same case that provisional ballots are not automatically invalid just because they were cast in the wrong precinct, but the correct building.
The relief in the new court ruling only relates to instances at which the voter was at the wrong building because an election official misinformed him or her. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link. The case is Service Employees International Union v Husted, 2:12-cv-562, southern district.
